Palestinian Women’s Activism: Nationalism, Secularism, Islamism

By Islah Jad

Jad traces the transformation of the Palestinian women’s movement from the 1930s to the post-Oslo period and through the Second Intifada to examine the often-fraught relationship between women and nationalism in Palestine. Offering one of the first intensive studies of Islamist women’s activism, Jad also explores the impact of emerging feminist NGOs in depoliticizing the secular Palestinian women’s movement. Studying these two developments together illuminates the nature of women’s engagement in the Palestinian space, challenging myths of gender roles’ "immutability" under Islamand the supposed "modernizing" benefits of Western-style activism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Dec 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9780815654599

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Copyright © 2018 by Syracuse University Press

Syracuse, New York 13244-5290

All Rights Reserved

First Edition 2018

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ISBN: 978-0-8156-3608-3 (hardcover) 978-0-8156-3614-4 (paperback) 978-0-8156-5459-9 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jād, Iṣlāḥ, author.

Title: Palestinian women’s activism : nationalism, secularism, Islamism / Islah Jad.

Other titles: Gender, culture, and politics in the Middle East.

Description: First edition. | Syracuse, New York : Syracuse University Press, 2018. | Series: Gender, culture, and politics in the Middle East | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018051492 (print) | LCCN 2018046834 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815636083 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780815636144 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780815654599 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815654599 (E-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Women, Palestinian Arab—Political activity—West Bank. | Women, Palestinian Arab—Political activity—Gaza Strip. | Feminism—West Bank. | Feminism—Gaza Strip. | Non-governmental organizations—West Bank. | Non-governmental organizations—Gaza Strip. | Islam and politics—West Bank. | Islam and politics—Gaza Strip. | Palestinian Federation of Women’s Action Committees. | Women’s Center for Legal Aid and Counselling. |Ḥizb al-Khalāṣ al-Waṭanī al-Islāmī. |Ittiḥād Jam’īyāt al-Mar’ah al-Filasṭīnīyah.

Classification: LCC HQ1236.5.W45 J34 2018 (ebook) | LCC HQ1236.5.W45 (print) | DDC 305.42095694/2—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018051492

Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acronyms

1. Uprooted Nation, Stateless Nationalism

Palestinian Women’s Activism in Context

2. The Conundrums of Post-Oslo Palestine

From Militants to Citizens without Citizenship

3. Between Faith and Feminism

Islamist Women of Hamas

4. The New Islamic Woman

Gender Discourse and Islamist Politics

5. Conclusions

Islamists and the Forging of a Common Ground between Women

Epilogue

The Political Life of Palestinian Women since 2004

APPENDIX A. Chronology of Palestinian Women’s Organizations

APPENDIX B. List of Interviews by Organization

Glossary

References

Index

Illustrations

1. Egyptian Muslim Brothers emblem

2. Palestinian Muslim Brothers emblem

3. Hamas emblem

4. Organizational structure of the Muslim Brothers movement in Palestine

Preface

THE ESTABLISHMENT of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in 1994 pursuant to the Oslo Agreement heralded major transformations not only in Palestinians’ governance, but in the society as a whole. My original aim in this research was to explore the implications of the PA’s establishment for the Palestinian women’s movement from a gender perspective, and to examine the changes occurring within the women’s movement during a new era of state building. I viewed my research as involving a novel subject in its exploration of the incongruity of a state—or, more precisely, a quasi-state—born after long years of colonization but that could not be called postcolonial as colonization was still flagrantly manifest in all aspects of Palestinian life. I was particularly intrigued by the ways in which this quasi-state would handle issues related to the control of its resources and development planning and how those issues would influence gender relations and the women’s movement. I was also curious to probe the difficult connections between a national liberation movement, geared to mobilizing its constituencies for a long struggle, and a new state bureaucracy in need of different types of structures, constituencies, and discourses. The study of the Palestinian women’s movement would be no less intriguing. It is concurrently faced with three major tasks: continuing the national struggle and participating in state building while at the same time pressing for women’s rights. Like women’s movements worldwide, the Palestinian women’s movement has grappled with both old agendas of mobilization and liberation as well as new ones involving women’s equality and empowerment. Under normal circumstances, it is difficult to straddle these two agendas—all the more so when there is an extraordinary situation in which the Israeli Occupation threatens the very physical existence of both state and society.

The extremity of the situation became shockingly apparent in March 2002, when women leaders examined the possibility of pouring into the streets to stop the advance of Israeli tanks reoccupying Palestinian cities. The conclusion was simple but very revealing: We are not organized, they said. The capacity of not only women, but of many other social groups, to be mobilized had evidently diminished during the era of supposed state building. I realized that I might have been pursuing a passing moment, a vanishing project that was being overtaken by history.

The various conflicts I was tracing among different women’s groups that were trying to position themselves and articulate new feminist interests and discourse all assumed the existence of a state apparatus to which they could direct their demands, protests, or opposition. But the nascent state structures were clearly ill equipped to respond. The physical destruction of most official buildings, including the headquarters of the PA’s chief executive, along with many other institutions and resources, forced me to shift my focus to the arena of civil society and the opportunities there for women to continue resisting the Occupation while working toward a more equitable gender order. The new Palestinian civil society that had emerged, though it provided a forum to discuss democratization, human rights, and women’s rights, was largely depoliticized and had effectively lost its own previous capacity to organize and mobilize different groups, and in particular, women’s groups aiming to combat the Occupation.

A central contributing factor to these developments was a shift in the role of the NGO sector that led to pressure on women’s groups to alter their shared agenda from one that combined the national struggle with women’s emancipation into one targeting the state to claim women’s rights. Many successful women’s grassroots organizations increasingly came under the influence of NGO practices or were outright transformed into NGOs. One of my main arguments is that the transformation from organizations of mass mobilization into NGOs was ultimately disempowering in that it weakened the mobilizing potential of secular feminist women’s organizations and depoliticized their activism. I aim to contribute a critical perspective to the growing trend in Middle East studies in which secular, feminist NGOs are depicted as the modern and democratic agents of civil society (Moghadam 1997, 25; Kandil 1995), by problematizing the unqualified and interchangeable use of the terms NGO and social movement in the Palestinian case, in particular, and in the Middle East, in general (Kandil 1995; Moghadam 1997; Bishara 1996; Beydoun 2002; Barghouti 1994; Chatty and Rabo 1997; Shalabi 2001). Many scholars view the proliferation of NGOs in the Middle East as evidence of a vibrant civil society and paradoxically as counterhegemonic to Islamist discourse (Norton 1993, 1995; Ibrahim 1993, 1995; al-Sayyid 1993; Moghadam 1997). However, little is done to evaluate the impact of the proliferation of NGOs on the empowerment of the different social groups they claim to represent and in their capacity to present a viable alternative to Islamist groups. Specifically, there has been little attempt to verify whether they succeed in mobilizing or organizing different groups in pursuit of their rights. In addition, few studies on the Middle East focus on how NGOs affect and interact with other forms of social organization such as unions, political parties, or social movements involving students, women, or workers (Hanafi and Tabar 2002; Beinin and Vairel 2011).

In an attempt to critically read the history and evolution of the Palestinian women’s movement from its inception, I reviewed the literature on Palestinian society in general and Palestinian women’s activism in particular starting from the turn of the twentieth century, focusing on the span from the 1930s through the 1980s. I undertook new field research to cover the period from the beginning of the 1990s, with a special focus on the political and social processes that the Oslo Agreement triggered, leaving deep imprints on all forms of social organization in the Occupied Territories. The initial phase of this research, which took place between 2000 and 2004—encompassing most of the period of the second intifada—examined the diminishing space for the Palestinian women’s movement that used to be linked to political parties under the umbrella of the PLO. It also examined the rising power, since 1987, of the Islamists of Hamas and their politically and socially engaged female cohort, newcomers to the scene of women’s activism in Palestine. As a consequence of this diversification, amplified by the establishment in 1995 of Hamas’s Islamic National Salvation Party and its influential Women’s Action Department, I speak of Palestinian women’s movements in the plural from the mid-1990s forward. The legislative elections of 2006 and subsequent political schism of 2007 inspired me to renew my research to trace developments under the two parallel governments that resulted, the secular-nationalist one in the West Bank and the Islamist one in Gaza. This stage of research, which figures in the epilogue, reinforced the focal argument that the NGO-ization of feminist organizations has undermined their mobilizing potential and led to their depoliticization, leaving a vacuum that was filled by the Islamists.

As my research illuminated the relevance of the growing power of the Islamists, now taking on the mantle of national struggle despite their being widely seen as undemocratic, fundamentalist, and not part of true civil society, I took aim at another mark: to reconceive the juxtaposition of the image of the secular, feminist modern agent of civil society with that of the Islamist woman, seen by many Palestinian feminists as the traditional, backward, and anti-feminist moving tent.¹ This juxtaposition is portrayed in Islamist discourse as a conflict between the Islamist woman giver to her nation under Occupation and the secular feminist woman taker, who makes claims for her nation while ignoring its plight. These are caricatures, I argue, that do nothing to elucidate the growing power of the Islamists in civil society in Palestine and the broader Middle East. Most crucially, they hinder the recognition of possible common ground between women’s groups.

By studying, for the first time, women activists in the National Islamic Salvation Party—a component of Hamas—against the background of the gender ideology and daily practice of the party and women’s activism, I aim to problematize the relationship between feminism, secularism, and Islam (seen as intrinsically anti-secular and consequently anti-modern) (Bill and Springborg 1990; Lewis 1964, 1988; Kedourie 1992; Crone 1980). Many scholars have portrayed Islam as a threat to secularism, which is understood as the total separation of the realm of politics from the realm of religion (al-Azmeh 1996; Roy 1999; Tibi 1987). I concur with Asad’s (2003) approach of not separating the two realms but rather of examining the historical circumstances in which the secular political project or the Islamist vision prevails (189).

Debates on Islam and feminism have centered on the compatibility of Islam with women’s rights, and some have suggested that Islamist movements might be empowering in certain circumstances (White 2002; Haeri 1993; Mir-Hosseini 1996, 2003; Moghadam 1988; Najmabadi 1998; Hoodfar 1995a, 1995b; Afshar 1994; Afkhami 1994; Göçek and Balaghi 1994; Mahmood 2005). Shari‘a law has been a terrain of contestation and power struggle between Islamists and secularist feminists, not only in Palestine but in the Middle East at large. The Islamists seek to preserve shari‘a law as one step toward the Islamization of all laws in their quest for an Islamic state, while secularist feminists want to replace it with secular laws based on individual rights and driven by the principle of total equality. Recent works by feminists (Karam 1998; Mir-Hosseini 1996, 2003, 1999; Badran 1994, 1995; Anwar 2009) appear more keen to accommodate the Islamists and present Islam and feminism as compatible through the flexibility of the religious text and through ijtihad (independent intellectual investigation of religious texts). This hermeneutic approach contrasts with an approach that focuses on the actual lived experience of women under Islamist rule or secular nationalism (Hale 1994; White 2002; Kandiyoti 1991b, 1996; Mahmood 2009).

Based on my empirical findings, I argue that gender roles and relations and women’s rights are not immutable under Islam but rather are evolving in the context of the activism of its women’s movement and its changing identity. The articulation of women’s rights depends on many internal and external factors. Internal factors include the dynamics of the Islamist movement itself, women’s place within the hierarchy of the Islamist movement, and women’s ability to establish an autonomous agenda. External factors include the discourses and activism of secular feminist movements that strongly influence the debate on women’s rights in the Islamist movement. The brand of feminism created by Islamists, I argue, is contingent upon and reactive to a secular backdrop. It has proven difficult, with the data at hand, to categorize any form of Islamist feminism without first scrutinizing the rejoinders it offers to modernist, secularist principles. Thus, the notion of Islam’s inner logic might be better conceived of not as fixed, but as a reactive position that is in tension and dialogue with contending ideologies.

In sum, the relative positions of and interrelationship between secular and Islamist women’s activism in the post-Oslo Palestinian sphere have been broadly misunderstood in two fundamental ways. First, it has been widely assumed that Western development institutions and donors’ ever-growing connections with and influence over the women’s groups that developed out of the PLO and their successors in the PA have of course benefitted the latter; I show, in fact, that those connections and that influence have weakened secular women’s groups both conceptually and practically, greatly strengthening the hand of their Islamist counterparts. Second, Islamist women’s activism is routinely described as if it takes place in an ideological bubble, in which all the significant influences are largely unchanging religious ones; I show, in fact, that even as the Islamists have gained in relative efficacy, they have developed their concepts and strategies in a process that involves constant engagement, both oppositional and appropriative, with those of their secular counterparts.

My attempt to problematize the perception of Hamas’s ideology and practices as immutable and frozen on the part of some women’s groups, and in particular the feminist NGO sector, is specifically prompted by the ongoing debate on proposed reforms of shari‘a law, the implications of which extend well beyond Palestinian society. I am searching for a common ground for better understanding, recognition, and the encouragement of a spirit of dialogic engagement (Beinin and Stork 1997, 22) between different women’s groups and activisms. The critical pursuit of dialogic engagement might help women pay more attention to historical specificity, as well as clarify the nuances of difference and similarity between and within Islamist movements across the Muslim world. It might also assist in the effort to put forward aspirations for social change, whether those of Islamist or secular groups, in more workable ways that take into consideration a broad range of factors related to history, society, politics, economics, and culture.

1. The tent metaphor refers to their long, usually dark-colored robes and veils.

Acronyms

1

Uprooted Nation, Stateless Nationalism

Palestinian Women’s Activism in Context

THE AIM OF THIS CHAPTER is to place Palestinian women’s activism in the context of Palestine’s political history of nationalist struggle. Women had to forge a space for themselves in the national struggle, since the construction of Palestinian nationalism centered on the image of the male fighter as liberator of the nation, and on struggle and sacrifice as hallmarks of patriotism. Women’s activism introduced some changes to the gender imagery of Palestinian nationalism but did not reach the point of changing the prevailing gender order. The Palestinian women’s movement was, and continues to be, led by a middle-class urban elite. The discourse of the modern versus the traditional employed by this elite resulted, historically speaking, in the marginalization of the important role played by rural and, more recently, refugee women. The moment in the 1940s that this movement was able to transcend class and regional divides (urban versus rural and later refugees), it managed to mobilize and organize women on a large scale, incorporating them into the national struggle. A mirror image of the urban elite’s discourse was later used by the Islamists to undermine that elite’s leadership role. Gender was thus flexible, yielding different images and different sorts of women’s participation in each phase of nationalism, but central to all of them.

The establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in 1994 marked a turning point in the history of the Palestinian national movement and the Palestinian women’s movement. Israeli harassment and land confiscation discredited the PA and gave power to the Islamists as the bearers of the flag of true national liberation. The PA was the impetus for major changes in all Palestinian political movements. In the Palestinian women’s movement, power was granted to new feminist elites working from within civil society in NGOs or from within the PA apparatuses, leading to the emergence of femocrats.¹ This changed the composition and the strategies of what must now be categorized as the secular women’s movement at the expense of women cadres of rural or refugee background. Islamists are the main contesters of this hegemony.

The Trouble with Nationalism(s)

Palestinian nationalism projected a contradictory image of Palestinian women and their movement during the Mandate period. On one hand, women were seen as the modernizers and civilizing agents of the long-awaited independent nation. This enabled the women’s movement to develop and become visible. On the other hand, women were also seen as the emblem of their nation’s authenticity and of historic social patterns. In this role, women were confined to private space as the wards of their male relatives. Due to what Chatterjee (1993) calls the inherent contradictoriness in nationalist thinking (38), modernity claims to advance and progress the nation while at the same time preserving its distinctiveness and particular traditions.

These troubled links between Palestinian women and their national movement were comparable to experiences in other third world countries in which nationalist vanguards were acting as the modernizers of their nation and their women. As Jayawardena (1986) notes in her analysis of women’s roles in nationalist movements throughout the third world, the status of women in society was the popular barometer of ‘civilization’ (8). Education, freedom of movement, and monogamy became hallmarks of civilized modernity. British, Arab, and Zionist leaders all gave their attention to the process of modernizing women as a measure of the legitimacy of their power in Palestine (Katz 1996, 93; 2003; Fleischmann 2003; Chatterjee 1993).

I would propose an alternative model of investigating the histories of the struggles of different social groups. Nationalist projects often articulate different interests, from political autonomy to liberation from economic oppression that may concern different social groups to very different degrees. This was the case in Mandate Palestine, where the interests of the national elite, men and women, differed from those of peasants in many ways. The first tended to be conciliatory toward the colonial power, while the latter saw in the presence of this power their utter demise and destruction.

Dominant accounts generally define the fellaheen (peasants) as traditional, backward, and conservative, as activated by tribal and religious loyalties (Budeiri 1979, 46–47), and as too isolated, ignorant and poor to play a significant role in the national movement (Lesch 1979, 17). In the same vein, rural women have been portrayed as victims of ignorance and poverty and the object of middle-class women’s charity (Mogannam 1937; Khartabil 1995; Shahid 1999). These views consider peasants, and especially women peasants, as incapable of political initiative or collective action. Swedenburg (1988) showed that while subordinate to the rule of the notables, the peasantry nonetheless possessed a significant tradition of opposition to the hegemony of the British and Palestinian elite, as reflected in the Great Revolt of 1936–39. As Gramsci noted, the hegemony of a dominant class is never total or exclusive; it is, rather, a process, a relation of dominance that has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended and modified (Williams 1977, 112–13).

Thus, instead of ascribing particular developments to tradition or to Islam, I shall seek to understand the ways specific cultural and religious currents influenced the behavior of particular groups in particular circumstances, and how the social and political settings in which movements occurred helped shape the choice of strategies and thus the outcomes as well. By situating the movements discussed in this chapter in a broad context, it is possible to see more clearly the connections between changes within groups and their effects on society, the economy, and the ruling power (whether colonial or national).

Nationalism and Women’s Activism under the British Mandate (1918–1948)

This section focuses on the relationship between national liberation and women’s emancipation during the successive waves of national struggle. Palestinian national movements, whether during the British Mandate or in their reinvigoration in the mid-1960s, are evaluated by many feminist scholars as, at best, unable to articulate a coherent vision or platform on gender (Sayigh 1988; Peteet 1991; Jad 1991), and at worst, as conservative, traditional, and chauvinist (Massad 1995; Parker 1999; Budeiri 1995; Rubenberg 2001). I argue here that while the successive Palestinian national movements were unable to articulate a coherent platform on gender, their fragmented gender views came about as a reaction to women’s activism. Women’s activism, in turn, was, to a great extent, the product of the national movement and its various factions. In this chapter and the next, I examine the gender agenda of the secularist national movements. In chapters 3 and 4, I examine the ideology of the Palestinian Islamists, who, like the nationalists, were also reactive to women’s activism.

The link between nationalist and gender discourses has been analyzed in different historical and cultural contexts. Kandiyoti (1991a) argues, for example, that the integration of women into modern nationhood follows a different trajectory from that of men. For instance, the protection of women’s sexuality constitutes a crucial distinction between the nation and its ‘others’ (430). Common to the various analyses is the centrality given to the role of women in nationalist projects. Anthias and Yuval-Davis identify "five major . . . ways in which women have tended to participate